Robert Jeffress

Farewell from Moscow: This American ran into GetReligion online and never stopped reading

Farewell from Moscow: This American ran into GetReligion online and never stopped reading

To be honest, I still can’t remember how I found GetReligion.

Thanks to Google, I was able to find what I’m guessing what my first GetReligion shout-out — it was a post by Julia Duin some seven years ago about the Southern Baptist megachurch leader Robert Jeffress claiming that God had given the once and potentially future President Donald Trump the authority to kill North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un.

To be honest, Jeffress’ comments were made in 2017, which was an era whose troubles I now view with a kind of nostalgia. Sigh, I used to worry about COVID-19.

The tip I’d submitted to this weblog about that story reveals that I had only begun learning to critically view the media and the world in the way GetReligion taught to me and many other readers and listeners. Back then, I thought it was funny to point out the New York Daily News’ editorial incompetence for having published the sentence “though shalt not kill.” You know, as opposed to “thou shalt not kill.” It’s part of that whole Ten Commandments thing.


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New podcast: Yes, New York's governor urged church folks to be her 'apostles' backing vaccines

New podcast: Yes, New York's governor urged church folks to be her 'apostles' backing vaccines

Hey news consumers, remember that time when President Donald Trump stood in front of a church (sort of in an urban war zone), held up a Bible and the world went nuts?

Chances are good that you heard about it. However, as a refresher, here are 66,100,1000 Google references to this incident, as well as as an imperfect collection of other Trumpian news involving the word “Bible.”

Or remember that time when Trump — long-time member of the liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and probably, in terms of private life, one of the most secular presidents in American history — went to Liberty University to court evangelicals and said this (care of an NPR report):

"We're going to protect Christianity. I can say that. I don't have to be politically correct," he thundered at the beginning of his speech at the conservative evangelical university.

Then he moved on to cite "Two Corinthians 3:17, that's the whole ballgame. ... Is that the one you like?" Trump asked. "Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty."

Over at Google, there appear to be a mere 2,380,000 references to this “Two Corinthians” incident.

Truth is, politicians often say and do strange things while courting support in religious settings that are way outside their own cultural comfort zone.

This brings us to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, which focuses on the coverage — actually, the lack of coverage — of the recent visit that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul paid to the Christian Cultural Center, a massive and very influential predominantly African-American megachurch in Brooklyn. Click here to get that podcast, or head over to Apple Podcasts.

Now, there was more to this political-religious event than the hilarious typo in the rushed transcript of the governor’s remarks produced, apparently, by a staff member. Check out the opening words here: “The phrase be to God, this is the day the Lord has made. Amen, amen.”

Let’s assume that the governor actually said “praise be to God.”


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First Baptist in Dallas works to promote COVID-19 vaccines: Was this a big news story?

First Baptist in Dallas works to promote COVID-19 vaccines: Was this a big news story?

If you have followed news coverage of debates about COVID-19 vaccines, you know that the leaders of churches and major religious denominations — Black and White — have been walking a tightrope on this issue.

Once this subject became politicized — like everything else in American life — there was almost no way to tackle it without causing more tension in their flocks.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of major religious leaders have been doing everything they can to make it possible for more people to safely return to the pews. These efforts have received quite a bit coverage at the local level.

Take, for example, this recent headline in The Dallas Morning News: “Robert Jeffress hopes to combat vaccine fears with First Baptist Dallas’ COVID-19 vaccination effort.” Here is the overture:

To combat vaccine hesitancy among Christian evangelicals, First Baptist Church in Dallas will have a COVID-19 vaccination clinic. …

Senior pastor Robert Jeffress said he hopes the move will encourage people to get shots so more of his 14,000 congregants can come and worship in person.

“Our church will never be what it needs to be until you’re back. The greater risk is the spiritual danger of staying isolated,” Jeffress said in a recent sermon. “I’m not forcing anybody to get the vaccine. That’s your choice. But what I am saying is if you are not back yet, and would like to come back, one option is to take the vaccine, and therefore you don’t have to worry about what other people do or don’t do here in the church.”

Like I said, this was a totally normal local story on this issue.

However, stop and think about this question: Would this have been a bigger story — attracting coverage from TV networks and elite newsrooms such as The New York Times — if Jeffress had taken a stance against the vaccines?

You know it would have been a national story, in part because of this preacher’s past support for former President Donald Trump.


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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

In 31 years of full-time journalism, I’ve been blessed to work with some incredible people.

The world recently lost two of the best.

Rachel Zoll was one of The Associated Press’ two New York-based national religion writers — along with Richard Ostling — when I joined AP’s Nashville bureau in 2002.

She was always so kind and supportive of me and my work, as she was with countless others. I last saw her at the 2017 Religion News Association annual meeting in Nashville. I had left AP more than a decade earlier, so I was surprised when she asked how my wife, Tamie, was doing. I had no idea she knew Tamie was battling autoimmune disease. But she did.

Early in 2018, Zoll was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died Friday in Amherst, Mass., at 55.

Her AP colleague David Crary, who called Zoll his “best friend at work,” wrote a truly touching obituary.

Zoll and Ostling were AP’s national religion dream team for five years until his retirement in 2006.

Ostling enjoyed a legendary career with Time magazine before going to work at AP and now, in retirement, with GetReligion. But he told Zoll during her illness that “on a day-to-day basis our work together was the highlight” of his time in journalism.

Amy Raymond and I both got our start working on The Talon campus newspaper at Oklahoma Christian University. I was excited when she joined The Oklahoman staff in 1997, a few years after me.

Although Raymond and I hadn’t worked together in nearly two decades, we stayed in touch via Facebook. We occasionally chatted about religious and political issues.

On a Zoom discussion Monday night, current and former colleagues kept saying — through tears — how smart and kind she was. That is the absolute truth.

“Amy started as a staff writer but her true passion became apparent as she made her way up the ladder as a copy editor, page designer, and then as night news editor,” my longtime friend and former Oklahoma Christian classmate Steve Lackmeyer wrote in The Oklahoman this week.


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New podcast: Familiar splits among white 'evangelicals,' only now they're about vaccines

New podcast: Familiar splits among white 'evangelicals,' only now they're about vaccines

It’s really a matter of simple math and logic.

Let’s start with this question, stripped of the political and journalism questions attached to it: Which of the following numbers is larger and, thus, more important — 45 or 55?

If you said “45,” then you’re ready to write headlines and edit controversial stories for The New York Times.

Before we move on, let’s ask another question that was at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). I’ll frame this in as neutral a manner as possible: If members of the Democratic Party were divided 55% “yes” to 45% “no” on a major decision, would you see this (a) as a sign that Democrats were united in opposition to the question at hand or (b) that Democrats were starkly divided on the question, with a majority taking a positive stance? I should mention that the 55% “yes” vote includes virtually all of leaders of major institutions within the world of Democratic Party life.

With that in mind, let’s contemplate the story under the following double-decker headline from the Times:

White Evangelical Resistance Is Obstacle in Vaccination Effort

Millions of white evangelical adults in the U.S. do not intend to get vaccinated against Covid-19. Tenets of faith and mistrust of science play a role; so does politics.

This brings us to the crucial summary material in this story:

The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.

“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.


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Where are reporters supposed to turn for a balanced list of 2020 religious pundits?

Where are reporters supposed to turn for a balanced list of 2020 religious pundits?

In a time of intense anxiety across America, an influential clergyman brands a president he opposes for re-election as “essentially” the same as a foreign “dictator,” and even calls him the “Fuhrer.”

When? Who? Though opponents of Donald Trump have applied an alternative N-word— “Nazi” — during the equally tense 2020 campaign, The Guy is talking about some harsh words aimed at Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was seeking his controversial third term.

The president’s accuser was the Rev. Charles Clayton Morrison, who served 39 years as editor of the “mainline” Protestant Christian Century magazine, who despised Roosevelt’s military preparedness and the draft. As an anti-war socialist, he thought Adolph Hitler’s conquests, though displeasing, could create “a united Europe governed from the German center, with a unified planned economy” that would supplant “perverted” capitalist influences.

Journalists of that era would have been well advised to also seek out contrasting religious views from a trio of eminent Roosevelt friends in the New York City clergy establishment, Protestant Professor Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise and the recently appointed Catholic Archbishop Francis Spellman. Reporters always need to know who to call for diverse points of view.

The Guy’s musings about matters 80 years ago are provoked by a list of 20 campaign sources suggested to the media by the Religion News Association’s handy ReligionLink website.

Journalists can reflect on how times have changed. A 2020 listing can offer no divines with the public stature of those 1940 leaders. ReligionLink cites no thinkers from religious periodicals like the Century, or Christianity Toda, or the Catholic America, Commonweal,or conservative EWTN media cluster, or the Jewish upstarts at www.tabletmag.com.

For some reason, the list bypasses religion analysts at the Washington think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Ethics & Public Policy Center, Brookings Institution or Center for American Progress. With legal conflicts raging, the listing proposes calls to Rachel Laser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State but no attorney backing contrary religious liberty claims from the Becket Fund or the Alliance Defending Freedom — groups active in arguing cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

On a list heavy with academics, it’s surprising not to see John C. Green of the University of Akron, the poli sci patriarch on the religion factor since the 1980s, or any specialist on the vast Southern Baptist Convention and white southern evangelicalism.


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Post-Trump, how will U.S. evangelicals deal with internal rifts and external hostility? 

The Donald Trump Era will end, whether in 2025 or 2021, and current state-by-state polls suggest it's the latter.

Reporters who get religion need to prepare for coverage whenever U.S. evangelical Protestantism reassesses its Trump-free past and future. That’s a big story, since this remains the most vibrant segment of U.S. religion, indeed, one of the nation’s largest movements of any type.

Evangelicalism first has internal rifts to work through. Make that white evangelicals. For the most part, Black, Latino and Asian-American evangelical churches, distinctly different in political sentiments, are unified, thriving and granted cultural respectability by the press..

White evangelicals’ public media image is all but overwhelmed by a coterie of Trump enthusiasts (think Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Paula White). There’s also a dogged faction of Trump skeptics (David French, Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, or on occasion Sen. Ben Sasse or Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore).

But is evangelicalism merely a political faction? Of course not.

Largely ignored by the media, there’s a vast apparatus of denominations, local congregations, “parachurch” agencies, charities, mission boards and schools where leaders (whatever they think personally about Trumpish political histrionics) focus on traditional ministry and education.

The Trump years have created a gap between that non-partisan leadership elite and grassroots folk who identify as “evangelicals” with pollsters (whatever that means in belief or practice). Innumerable news articles have reported they gave Trump 81% backing in 2016.

But white evangelicals always vote heavily Republican. The Guy advises journalists that white Catholics will decide Trump’s fate. Our own tmatt notes the evidence showing that the 2016 vote was more anti-Hillary Clinton than pro-Trump.

While the evangelicals try to overcome their political squabbles to recapture past morale, they face hostility from culture-shaping higher education and (yes) the mass media that enhances their image problems.


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Home, home on the rage: And seldom was heard an unpredictable word in Trump Bible wars

Let me just shout a quick “Amen!” in response to the sentiments offered on Twitter by my colleague Bobby Ross Jr.

Here’s the quote: “Too. Much. News.

For the past three decades or so, Tuesday has been the work day when I try to hide away and write my “On Religion” column, which I ship to the Universal syndicate on Wednesday morning (this week: black preachers, Old Testament prophets and centuries of pain).

Nevertheless, during the past day or so I have been following the Trumpian Bible battles on Twitter. I saw, of course, quite a few people — including conservative Christians — addressing President Donald Trump’s Bible-aloft photo op. I wondered, frankly, whether we would hear from many of those people in the mainstream press coverage that would follow. Uh. That would be “no.”

So raise your hands if you were surprised that the Episcopal Church leadership in Washington, D.C., was outraged? Their comments were essential, of course, because the story unfolded in front of the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House (site of a fire a day earlier). So you knew religious progressives would get lots of hot ink, as in the Washington Post piece that opened with the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington:

“I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop,” Budde said.

She excoriated the president for standing in front of the church — its windows boarded up with plywood — holding up a Bible, which Budde said “declares that God is love.”

“Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence,” Budde of the president. “We need moral leadership, and he’s done everything to divide us.”

Let’s keep reading. Raise your hand if you are surprised that predictable evangelicals said predictable things — which is also a valid part of the story:

Johnnie Moore, a spokesman for several of Trump’s evangelical religious advisers, tweeted favorably about the incident as well.

“I will never forget seeing @POTUS @realDonaldTrump slowly & in-total-command walk from the @WhiteHouse across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church defying those who aim to derail our national healing by spreading fear, hate & anarchy,” he wrote. “After just saying, ‘I will keep you safe.’ ”


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Year in review: Ten religion stories that stuck with me in 2019, including one of my own

Did Santa bring everything you wanted for Christmas?

I hope so.

As we head toward a new year, I wanted to pull a few items out of my gift bag.

Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the most memorable religion stories that I read (and one I even wrote) in 2019:

1. As his daughter lay in a pool of blood in an El Paso Walmart, a pastor held fast to his faith, Los Angeles Times

In an Aug. 8 post, I praised Times national correspondent David Montero’s front-page feature on the parents of an El Paso, Texas, shooting victim. I described it as “emotional, heart-wrenching and maybe the best religion story you'll read all year.” I stand by that statement.

Here (in no particular order) are 10 of the most memorable religion stories that I read (and one I even wrote) in 2019:

2. “Slavery and Religion: 400 years,” Religion News Service.
RNS national correspondent Adelle M. Banks’ compelling series focused on slavery and religion as Americans commemorated the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia. Datelines included New York City, Montgomery, Ala., and Jamestown, Va.


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